NOTE: This post is adapted from a newsletter takeover I did with Amber Horsburgh (former SVP of Strategy at Downtown Records) about the impact of smart speakers and voice interfaces on the music business. You can read Amber’s take on the topic here, and I highly recommend subscribing to her newsletter Deep Cuts for insights and tools related to music marketing & strategy. My own newsletter, Water & Music, takes a wide-angle view on the future of music and tech, and is also the best way to keep up with the articles I publish.
The future of voice and “screenless” music consumption arguably defies a lot of what we think we know about where this crazy industry is going.
On one hand, it’s nothing new that paid streaming subscriptions are ushering in an era of newfound growth for recorded music. Many of the world’s leading music services are citing the rise of smartphone adoption and unlimited data plans — particularly in Asian and African markets, but also continually in Europe and the Americas — as key driving forces behind streaming’s sustained global expansion in the future.
For instance, in its SEC filing and investor presentations, Spotify has cited that there are 1.2 billion payment-enabled smartphone users globally. In comparison, the Swedish company currently has around 160 million monthly active users, 60% of whom listen regularly on their mobile devices, and is reportedly opening new offices in emerging music and smartphone markets like Vietnam and Thailand — suggesting a significant growth opportunity both for itself and for its competitors.
But when it comes to the next wave of music consumption, believe it or not, cutting-edge technologists are already thinking beyond the phone.
While there certainly remains ample room for innovation within the existing monthly-subscription model, that format is far from the be all and end all of how we will experience and fall in love with music moving forward. (Plus, the steep downfall of physical sales was a brutal lesson for the music industry about the consequences of putting all of one’s commercial eggs into a single basket.)
As you read this, big-tech behemoths and early-stage startups alike are crafting music experiences that eliminate the screen altogether — leveraging the power of voice interfaces, smart speakers, geolocation and the Internet of Things (IoT) to deliver music in an even more frictionless, personalized and context-aware manner to the right users at the right time.
What’s more, according to the latest Smart Audio Report by NPR and Edison Research, 60% of smart-speaker owners regularly use their devices to play music — reinforcing music’s role, as a fundamentally emotional, communal and ceremonial art form, in framing early use cases for next-generation technological innovations.
As music begins to liberate itself fully from screens, the resulting consumption experience becomes more unbundled, more adaptive and more tied to physical place.
This last point cannot be overstated: as an experience, music will only become more physical and hyperlocal, not less, as technology improves. Unsurprisingly, the industry might overlook or dismiss this trend as they continue to funnel a high proportion of their marketing energy into mobile, lean-back listening.
Let’s break down these categories one-by-one — unbundled, adaptive, and tied to physical place — and explore what each of them might mean for the next wave of innovation and disruption in music.
UNBUNDLED
As I discussed in a recent article for Forbes, the last few technological disruptions in recent music history can be summarized as a continuous ungrouping and regrouping of content.
Napster and iTunes ungrouped (“unbundled”) albums into individual tracks for sale and exchange, and the onset of piracy slashed U.S. recorded music revenue by 40% over the course of more than a decade. In contrast, streaming services like Spotify are now “rebundling” isolated songs from otherwise disconnected artists and albums into the format of a playlist — and have helped the recorded music sector see its third consecutive year of growth in 2017.
The LED/LCD screen might be the last “bundle” standing in the music business. Without screens, and with the help of the best personalization algorithms, the tap-and-click friction required to reach and identify the right music for the right moment (e.g. “play music I would like for cooking”) will continue to decrease, bringing consumption and discovery one step closer to being truly instantaneous.
For instance, Amazon Music is already reporting significant spikes in voice requests for background music during major sports games, eclipsing tap-and-click requests in the Amazon Music service by as much as 500%.
There still remain certain obstacles to a completely frictionless music experience for voice, including pronunciation of different band names on the front end (e.g. MØ vs. M.O), as well as agreements between tech platforms and rights holders on how metadata standards should look on the backend. Nonetheless, the fact that music serves as a primary guinea pig in the rapid adoption of voice-enabled experiences at large suggests that the industry can usher in another period of growth for itself — à la Spotify, not Napster — if it focuses on the right opportunities.
ADAPTIVE
One of the biggest value propositions of smart speakers and voice interfaces for the music business is hyper-personalized contextual playlisting.
Spotify is already aggressively promoting context- and mood-based playlists on its own platform, including but not limited to Coffee Table Jazz (logo below), Ambient Chill and Songs to Sing in the Car. When it comes to follower count, these playlists are growing more quickly than their hard-editorial counterparts.
Yet, at least for now, Spotify’s contextual playlists still embrace more of a broadcast mentality, in that they serve up the same content to all users. In reality, your idea of “great music for cooking” or “coffee-table jams” might be significantly different from mine.
This is where big-tech hardware manufacturers like Amazon and Google want to provide added value to music recommendation. As Director of Amazon Music Ryan Redington recently told me: “If you listen to a lot country music and ask Alexa for a dinner playlist, we’ll serve you a country-related answer to that request.”
What’s more, even that highly specified use case — a country-leaning dinner playlist, tailored to the user — isn’t fully dynamic, adaptive, or reflective of technology’s potential for delivering sound. It still treats each song as a static piece of work, rather than as a recipe with multiple components that can mold more granularly to a user’s or fan’s mood, needs, tastes or curiosities at any given time.
Startups like Endel and Weav are experimenting on this frontier, adapting music and sounds to the user in real-time based on multiple parameters like temperature, heart rate, weather, mood and desired activity (e.g. work, focus, sleep). The music industry itself has yet to set up the proper legal framework to enable this interactivity more seamlessly, but we’re well on our way there.
TIED TO PHYSICAL PLACE
Perhaps the most significant implication of voice and context awareness for the music business is the emergence of distinct, isolated physical niches for listening.
What you personally listen to at home might be different from what you want to hear on the way to work, or while you’re going for a run. Today, most music streaming services are unable to pick up on this differentiation — but in a tightening race for subscribers, that level of detail will likely become the new norm.
Amazon, Google/Alphabet and Apple are arguably dominating the home market: Amazon with its Prime membership, its suite of smart Echo devices and its recent acquisition of home company Ring, Google with Google Home and key home-automation acquisitions like Nest, and Apple with its HomePod speaker, Apple TV and HomeKit framework for connecting home devices.
Given that big tech clearly dominates the smart-speaker industry, any voice-related developments in music will be funneled through these corporations, and by design will be intricately connected to the home — arguably one of the most predictable and measurable physical locations on the planet.
An increasing number of music and sound companies are also building brand-new applications catering to fitness, which is also inherently tied to place. Even though Spotify retired its Running feature in February 2018, startups like Aaptiv and Feed.fm are trying to fill in that gap by treating fitness and exercise as potent channels for music discovery, curation and licensing, as well as fan development (not dissimilar to how boutique fitness studios like SoulCycle already treat entertainment). Mighty Audio is developing an affordable, screen-less hardware device that allows owners to stream Spotify music on the go without an Internet connection—an iPod Shuffle for the streaming age—and fitness enthusiasts are among the startup’s most loyal customers.
Bose is developing its own audio-powered smart glasses and augmented reality platform that treat voice, rather than video or visuals, as the primary vehicle for location-based content discovery and engagement. There are myriad applications for music: for instance, if you’re walking around downtown Austin and want to shop around local indie venues, you can preview and listen to set lists for the evening with a simple hand gesture or voice command.
These are only a handful of examples across a vast community of companies and entrepreneurs envisioning a future for music beyond the phone — and we haven’t even reached the tipping point of music within the phone yet.
What do you think about the future, and present, of screen-less music consumption? Is it already impacting your career as an artist, or your tastes and habits as a music fan? I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback in the comments section below—and I’d also be eternally grateful if you clapped in support of this article, so that other avid readers like you can find it!
To read more of my thoughts on music, creativity, technology and business, you can follow me on Twitter and/or sign up for my newsletter, Water & Music.
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